Also interesting to contemplate is that from a linguistic point of view (i.e. being able to speak with the locals), NII, who was fluent in French, English and German apart from Russian, was more at home in Western Europe than in many of the western provinces of his empire. In his 1904 diary I came across a visit to "Турмонт" and assumed this to be a place in Western Europa, but it turned out to be the German name (Turmont)! of a Lithuanian town (Turmantas) on the St. Petersburg - Warsaw line. Leaving aside the fact that he very seldom spoke with anyone outside the elite, the only people he could speak with in that small town were the imperial officials and other members of the elite (Polish landowners?) who had learnt Russian and German-Baltic merchants. The Lithuanian peasants were unintelligble to him. Some of the Jews might have known standard German, I don't know if a German-speaker like NII would have understood Yiddish?
